condemned house on the St Johns River across the "bridge to nowhere" and began re- hearsing at my parent's house in what was formerly my bedroom. RM and I had grown up together since around four years old and was already like family, and Ronnie, Gary and Allen were always polite and my parents liked them very much. It was a great time. We played gigs here and there, but I was really missing Blackfoot and told RM I wanted to get Jakson and Charlie back together and re- sume where we left off. I told him I wanted him to go with me, but if he chose to stay it was perfectly okay with me because we would always be friends. He chose to leave with me so I (we) reformed the band again. It didn't last very long as RM wound up going back to Skynyrd. Charlie was not with us anymore, we got another guitar player (Bobby), DeWitt came back in, changed the name and kept going for a while. We spent the late spring and summer of 1972 in Atlanta recording all
8
original songs with the hopes of getting a record deal. DeWitt and Bobby went back to Jacksonville but Jakson and I remained, sleeping on packing quilts in the studio for two more months. Jakson and I were writing most of the songs and finished the record, with he and I running the board and playing different instruments. I even played a sax lead in a song. Imagine that! We regrouped in Gainesville, played some shows in Florida and Georgia for a couple of months and things fell apart again. Late fall '72 I bought a one way ticket to New York, walked into the Brill Building at 49th & Broadway and landed a gig with The Tokens of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight Fame". We had met them a couple of years earlier when living in New York, they remembered me, had just inked a deal with Atco Records and brought me into the fold. We did a brand new record, had a huge hit of a remake of Wilson Pickett's "In The Mid- night Hour" and it reached #14 in Billboard.
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